I can't say I always find that to be true for myself. There are truths that I wish weren't true, and when I find that I was merely being overly pessimistic, that's usually a good thing. Even though I want my beliefs to reflect reality, that doesn't stop me from sometimes wishing certain beliefs I have weren't true, even if I still think that they are. It's possible that being wrong can be a good thing in and of itself, completely separate from it being good to find out that you're wrong, if you're wrong.

A powerful computer with a bad algorithm or bad information can produce a high volume of bad results that are all internally consistent.

(IQ may not be directly analogous to computing power, but there are a lot of factors that matter more than the author's intelligence when assessing whether a model bears out in reality.)

That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing.

I definitely don't think it is. Too large a social circle can be unwieldy to manage, eating up a ton of someone's time for the sake of a huge variety of shallow and uninteresting relationships, even if somehow every person in said social circle is interesting. I don't mean to imply that everyone should strive to broaden their social circle by any means. There are plenty of people who don't feel socially isolated at all, and there are even plenty of people with the opposite problem.

I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descent into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one's weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descent into mediocrity.

I don't deny the existence of uninteresting people, but I think the descent into misanthropy failure mode is more common to high-intelligence people who feel socially isolated than the other failure mode, and hope that trying to more accurately assess people based on varied criteria and hack one's perception to see more people as interesting will not necessarily lead to dumbing down one's interests in order to relate to people on a more least-common-denominator basis. That's a choice that can be made once you've assessed people more accurately or favorably, and definitely one that doesn't have to be made just because you've updated your beliefs about the people you encounter.

I don't know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that's a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole "tabooing the word" context.

I agree with you, and in fact my original comment mentioned that "intelligence" is not the only single-axis evaluation label that people use. I think a more general phrasing might be "identify social single-axis fast-comparators that may be causing you to have cached first impressions about people. Fix your assessments by tabooing whatever label you happen to use, and making new assessments based on trying to counter your initial impression (Identify strengths of people you initially dislike, weaknesses of people you initially like too much). You may not change your mind about those people upon closer inspection, but it's still worthwhile to do as an exercise, particularly if you are unsatisfied with your social circle in general or your relationships with particular people."

Intelligence happens to be a pretty common single-axis comparator people I know (and relevant clusters to the LW population) use often.

I think it gets a bit more complicated than that because there are feedback loops. The problem is that an expression of the "s/he is dumb" sort is not necessarily a bona fide evaluation of someone's smarts. It may well be (and often is) just an insult -- and insults are more or less fungible.

I definitely don't discount the "sour grapes" scenario as something that probably happens a lot. In fact, I think that a lot of people's assessments of other people's intelligence involve, to put it kindly, subjective judgments along those lines, which is part of why I'm advocating trying to disrupt those.

That problem is likely to be mostly a function of two things: (1) How large a social network do you want to have (or are capable of maintaining); and (2) What's the quality of the fish in the pond in which you are fishing?

I definitely agree that those factors are pretty relevant to the aforementioned problem, but they're kind of moot. After all, (1) is equivalent to "Having a utility function that defines this as a problem", and (2) is something you can't necessarily control (If you see it as enough of a problem to move, I suppose you can, but that seems pretty expensive and it would be a shame to come to that solution without trying something like what I'm suggesting first). I'm merely suggesting that the perception of (2) may sometimes arise from an ill-formed manner of assessing "quality of fish".

How do you define and measure intelligence, then? When you say "Alice is more (or less) intelligent than Bob", what exactly do you mean?

Um, well, I guess I should quote myself here:

I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there's a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person's intelligence (In the vague socially-applicable sense we're talking about. Let's say "thinking correctly and clearly" for the sake of argument)

I think that as far as things we can assign cardinal values to and compare on a continuum, IQ is our best bet, but there do seem to be some nebulous other contributing factors (Maybe the much-touted EQ, a decent education, or some other "general life experience" factors? I dunno) which can make someone at least appear more or less intelligent than their IQ might imply (Again, operationally defined as "seeming to think clearly, correctly, and quickly". If you'd like to revise this operational definition to "exactly IQ" we can do that, and I'll still argue that it's not something most people are good at detecting from a first impression). Like I actually said, I think IQ is fine, and that most people undervalue its importance. I'm not sure where you got mixed up here. We could redefine "clear, correctly, quickly" as "interesting" rather than "intelligent," although for me personally that's necessary but not sufficient

I would agree there is a lot of self-fulfilling prophesies happening here, but I think they have much more to do with things like self-confidence and much less with making correct intelligence estimates, especially ex ante.

Self-confidence may be some people's problem, but it's definitely not everyone's problem. Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?

These things are not exclusionary -- you start with a speed-optimization and you continue with a better scheme as you get more information. If you get stuck on your cache hit, that's a general problem not specifically tied to evaluating other people.

I agree that getting stuck on one's cache hits in social assessment is not somehow a special case rather than a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. I would argue that social situations are a great problem domain in which to apply general rationality techniques, and that the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to "Tabooing concepts," something that's already gotten coverage here. I think that the domain is of enough interest to many people that this application of said technique may be worthwhile to mention, and is perhaps even a means of attacking the general "getting stuck on a cache hit" problem in a domain that might yield some immediately useful results for a non-negligible number of people. If said application is too obvious, I apologize for stating the obvious.

It's less that he finds an argument whose premise is repugnant, and more that he realizes that he doesn't have a good angle of attack for convincing the slavers to not mutilate/kill him at all, but does have one for delaying doing so. I'd argue it's more of a "perfect is the enemy of the good" judgement on his part than a disagreeable argument (After all, Tyrion has gleefully made that clarification to several people before.)

Do you, by any chance, have any data to support that? I am sure there are people for whom it's a problem, I'm not sure it's true in general, even among the nerdy cluster.

Very good point. I don't want to claim it's a statistical tendency without statistics to back it up. Nonetheless, given articles like the OP, it seems like a lot of people in said clusters (Could be self-selecting, e.g. intelligent nerd-cluster-peeps are more likely to blog about it despite not having a higher rate, etc) have a problem that consists of feeling socially isolated, unable to relate to people, and unable to engage people in a conversation. I'm simply pointing to a plausible explanation for at least some cases of that phenomenon, which I've built up from some observation of myself and my peers, and some theoretical knowledge (For example, http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf , well-known social cognitive biases such as the Fundamental Attribution Error, the "cached thought" concept that is well-known to lesswrong readers, etc) and come up with a rough strategy for mitigating it, which I think has been reasonably successful. I'd be very interested in knowing through some rigorous means whether this bears out in aggregate, but I can't point to any particular research that's been done, so I'll leave it as a fuzzy claim about a tendency I've observed, I don't claim that I would need extremely strong evidence to be convinced otherwise

That's a very common situation at parties where you circulate among a bunch of unknown to you people.

I agree, and I'm sure your heuristics are well-tuned for choosing who to talk to at parties given options that fit your criteria. The problem of having a social network limited by an unreasonably high minimum-intelligence requirement for interest in a person may not be one that you have, and even if you do, I suspect that it is seldom going to come up at a party you intentionally went to.

Nope, that is thinking correctly. Clear thinking is a bit difficult to put into words, it's more of a "I know it when I see it" thing. Maybe define it as tactical awareness of one's statements (or thoughts) -- being easily able to see the implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections, etc. of the claim that you're making?

I'd think that would be more succinctly stated as "thorough" (It actually doesn't matter, you defined your term well enough so I'm glad to use it, but it strikes me as a counterintuitive use of "clear"), but I still think it's a poor indicator. People sufficiently good at rehearsed explanations of an opinion or knowledge domain can sound much more like they've thought through {implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections} of their statement than someone who is thinking clearly (Even in that sense) but improvising, even if the improviser has a significantly higher IQ, for example.

I also don't deny that there may exist ways you can conversationally prod someone into revealing more about whatever intelligence measure you care about by e.g. forcing them to improvise, but a really well-articulated network of cached thoughts can be installed in a wide intelligence-variance of people, and it's a lot easier to jump a small inferential distance from a cached thought quickly than to generate one on the fly, and the former can be accomplished by being well-read.

I don't think I would agree. Making fine distinctions, maybe, but in a sufficiently diverse set there is rarely any confusion as to who's in the left tail and who's in the right tail. And I found that my perceptions of how smart people are correlate well with IQ proxies (like SAT scores).

I am willing to believe that some people are able to calibrate their IQ-sense well. I'm even more willing to believe that almost everyone believes that they are. I would bet that people who are around diverse groups of people willing to report proxy-IQ measures often are likely to get good at it over time. I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there's a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person's intelligence (In the vague socially-applicable sense we're talking about. Let's say "thinking correctly and clearly" for the sake of argument). I think there's a tendency in high-IQ circles to overvalue it. I'll agree that there's definitely an IQ-floor below which I've seldom met interesting people, but beyond that, there's too much variation in other factors to reliably rule out e.g. extremely smart but hidebound people who have domain-specific expertise and are not that interesting to talk to about anything else.

At any rate, I think we've moved off track here. Rest assured, I'm not trying to claim that no one is good at discerning the intelligence of other people (or especially just their IQ. If you're willing to operationally equate those then moot point I guess), I'm just suggesting that most people are bad at it, and even people who are good at it probably aren't as good as they think they are. I'm also suggesting that

1. It's entirely plausible that people who feel isolated, socially inept, and unable to have meaningful conversations with people are in a self-fulfilling prophecy due to using bad heuristics to determine intelligence and getting into a confirmation-bias/social signaling feedback loop that makes them unable to change their mind about said people (Illusion of transparency notwithstanding, it's not hard for a lot of people to pick up on someone thinking they're an idiot and not wanting to open up to them as a consequence).

2. Ignoring the vague "intelligence" label and trying to get at more granular aspects of people's personality, competencies, etc. is a good way to break what may be a cached speed-optimization rather than a good classification scheme. You can even use things you believe to be components of "intelligence" as your indicators if you like, that's a good way to make your notion of "intelligence" more concrete at the very least.

3. Viewing people in terms of their strengths is a good exercise for respecting them more and being better able to relate to them and utilize them for things they are good at. Relatedly, viewing people in terms of their weaknesses is a good exercise that can help break the "idolization" anti-pattern (Or test your assumptions about how to compete with them)

I'll admit that there's a bit of strategic overcorrecting inherent in the method I've outlined. That said, it's there for a good reason: First impressions are pretty famously resilient, and especially among certain cultures (Again, math-logic-arcane-cluster is a big one that's relevant to me), there's what I would argue is a clearly pathologically high false-positive rate for detecting "Dumb/Not worth my time".

If you ever have the idealized ceteris paribus form of the "I may only talk to one of two people, I have no solid information on either" problem, I seldom see a problem in using whatever quick-and-dirty heuristic you choose to make that decision (Although with the caveat that I don't endorse the general case for that being true: some people's heuristics are especially bad). However, over longer patterns of interaction with a given person, this problem does still seem to emerge, and the reasons why are modeled well by assuming a classifier that values being fast over being accurate (A common feature of human heuristic reasoning, and an extremely easy blind spot to overlook).

Even with a simplified operational definition like the one you've provided, I have severe doubts that anyone should be confident in their ability to reasonably make that assessment accurately in a short amount of time, or even over a long period of time in a single context or limited set of contexts. Also, to be frank that operational definition isn't doing much better than just saying "intelligent" with no clarification. To pick it apart:

-"Thinking clearly," as in "not making reasoning mistakes I can immediately identify?" Very easily confounded by instantaneous mental state as well as inferential distance problems.

-"Thinking correctly," okay, a success rate might be useful, except that anyone can regurgitate correct statements and anyone can draw mistaken conclusions based on bad information.

-"Thinking quickly" is really only useful given the other two.

As for intelligence not being someone's entire worth, I'm definitely glad we agree on that, but given the above, I'd argue it's not even all that useful. People often seem way more intelligent in contexts where they are knowlegeable, or in certain mental states, or when around certain other people. I don't claim that I don't value something called "intelligence," but I would claim that humans, myself included, are notoriously bad at assessing it, generalizing it, or for that matter agreeing on what it means, and given how vague a notion it is, it's very easy to short-circuit more useful assessments of people by coming up with a fast heuristic for "intelligence" that's comically bad but masked by a vague enough label.

Tabooing "intelligence" in my assessments of other people doesn't remove the concept from my vocabulary, it just slightly mitigates the problematic tendency to use bad heuristics and not apply enough effort to updating my model. I think it would serve a lot of people well as a technique for reasoning about people.

There's definitely a cultural tendency among those educated in the arcane (Computer science, Math, Physics is a reasonable start for the vague cluster I'm describing) to be easily convinced of another person/group/tribe's stupidity. I think it makes sense to view elitism as just another bias that screws with your ability to correctly understand the world that you are in.

More generally, a very typical "respect/value" algorithm I've seen many people apply:

-Define a valuable trait in extremely broad strokes. Usually one you think you're at least "decent" on (Examples include "intelligence", "popularity", "attractiveness", "success", "iconoclasm", etc.)

-Create a heuristic-based comparator function that you can apply to people quickly

-Respect/value people based on their position relative to you on your chosen continuum (Defined by your comparator)

This is at least common enough to note as an anti-pattern in social reasoning. When I fall into that pattern, I usually use "intelligence," as I'm sure many in the "Techie/Programmer/Atheist/Science nerd"-cluster tribe I find myself most affiliated with also do.

I think it helps to taboo the idea of intelligence. Intelligence is pretty great, but it's also a word with vastly disparate connotations, all of which are either too specific to be what people are actually talking about when they say the word, or too vague to be a useful measure to actually judge whether I like and find value in another person. I find that tabooing the idea of intelligence often will disrupt my "fast intelligence comparator" evaluation.

Once you don't let yourself use your easy cached comparator, you can start trying to assess people without it. Trying to think of a person in terms of their competencies is a good exercise in respecting them more. For example: "This person is good at reading subtle emotional/social cues" or "This person is good at encoding complex ideas in accessible analogies" or "This person is good at quickly coming up with a rough solution to a problem." As you can see, I get a more granular picture than "This person is smart" or "This person is dumb," even if some of my assessments are still kind of vague (The process can be iterated over more taboos if you find it still problematic, but I find that one is usually enough to get decent results). This has allowed me to build deep, interesting, and valuable friendships with people who I might have otherwise dismissed as "idiots" or even the less obvious and therefore more insidious "not that interesting."

This also works for another trap that single-dimensional heuristic-comparator reasoning can sometimes make one fall into: Respecting someone too much. I've found myself viewing someone as "vanishingly likely to be wrong" based on enough "greater-than" hits on my quick comparator, which introduces a huge blind spot into my reasoning about that person, things they say, etc. On top of that, being a sycophant and not challenging their ideas does them no service as a friend.

I've observed that this pattern is pretty common too, and that the people who fall into it are often not aware that they're doing it (They don't make the conscious decision not to question the person they respect too much, they just have overweighted that person's opinion as a classifier for arbitrary facts about reality). Fortunately, the same tactic seems to work. Stop using "intelligence." Try to pick up specific and granular weaknesses the person has (As a random side-note, this skill is pretty useful in any competitive environment as well). There's a wealth of cognitive bias information on this site that can be valuably applied to other people in this context.

Even if you're not interested in having friends or other kinds of warm fuzzy social relationships (I am, most people are, "cold rationalist" is a bad hollywood cliche, etc.), having a good model of other people, having a realistic, specific, and granular notion of people's strengths, weaknesses, and personality/tendencies can help you to better reason about the world (Other humans aren't perfect classifiers but many of them are better than you for specific purposes), better able to utilize people, and better able to navigate a social world, whether you consider yourself part of it or not.

There's a concept in game design called the "burden of optimal play". If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.

Most traditional RPGs weren't necessarily envisioned as competitive games, but most of the actual game rules are concerned with combat, optimization, and attaining power or prowess, and so there's a natural tendency to focus on those aspects of the game. To drive players to focus on something else, you have to make the rules of your game do something interesting in situations other than fantasy combat, magical attainment of power, or rogue-flavored skill rolls to surmount some other types of well-defined challenges. All of these things can make for a very interesting game world of a certain flavor, but in that game world, some kinds of players and characters will inevitably do much better than others, usually the ones that have some progression to a god-like power level using magic.

The flexibility afforded to the DM allows people to hypothetically run their game some other way, and many succeed, but the focal point of the game is defined by the focal point of the rules. They can decide to make their game center more around politics, romance, business, science, or whatever else, because they get to choose what happens in their world, but the use of an RPG system implies that the game world will be better at handling the situations the game has more rules, or more importantly, better-defined rules, for. The rules of a game are the tools with which players will build their experience, even in a more flexible game like an RPG.

A few friends of mine invented a system that I'm helping them develop and playtest. It's somewhat rough at present, but the intent is to make rules that center more around information and social dynamics. In playtesting, people naturally gravitate toward situations the game's rules are good at handling, so a lot more people are interested in being face characters than otherwise have been. Through some combination of the system and the person running the game, the rules will define what people naturally gravitate towards. This doesn't surprise us when the person running the game is replaced by a computer that follows the rules exactly, and tends to be true to varying degrees based on the flexibility with which the rules are interpreted.